What is energy burden?

Energy burden refers to the percent of a household’s income spent on energy costs.

An individual household’s energy burden might be high if they have low income, meaning the electric bill eats up more of each paycheck than a high income household. Or, someone’s energy burden might higher if they live poorly insulated house, their heating/cooling system is inefficient or outdated, they live in a climate that demands high heating or cooling, or all of the above.

The median energy burden for The United States is 3.1%.1 The average energy burden for the state of Virginia is slightly lower at 2%.2

Average energy burden for each census tract in the Charlottesville region ranges from about 1.5% to 6.5%. However, averaging all households in a tract makes it harder to see variation within one tract. So instead, we use 6% as a cutoff to define energy burdened households, and then we calculate that percentage of burdened households in each tract. The map below shows the percentage of households in each census tract that are energy burdened (meaning they spend 6% or more of their income on energy costs).

pal <- colorNumeric("Blues", reverse = FALSE, domain = cvlshapes$percentburdened)
leaflet(cvlshapes) %>%
  addProviderTiles("CartoDB.Positron") %>%
  addPolygons(data = cvlshapes,
              fillColor = ~pal(percentburdened),
              weight = 1,
              opacity = 1,
              color = "white",
              fillOpacity = 0.6,
              highlight = highlightOptions(weight = 2, fillOpacity = 0.8, bringToFront = T),
              popup = paste0(cvlshapes$NAME.y, "<br>",
                            "Pct. Burdened: ", round(cvlshapes$percentburdened, 2))) %>%
  addLegend("bottomright", pal = pal, values = cvlshapes$percentburdened,
            title = "Percent of Energy<br>Burdened Households", opacity = 0.7)

As we can see from this map, the places with the highest number of energy burdened households are in the city of Charlottesville and the western parts of Albemarle County and Louisa County. There is also a huge amount of variation across the region.